by Victor Serge
So as not to lose track of the date, you have to count the days attentively, mark each one with a cross. One morning you discover that there are forty-seven days—or one hundred and twenty, or three hundred and forty-seven!—and that it is a straight path leading backwards without the slightest break: colorless, insipid, senseless. Not a single landmark is visible. Months have passed like so many days; entire days pass by like minutes. Future time is terrifying. The present is heavy with torpor. Each minute may be marvelously—or horribly—profound. That depends to a certain extent on yourself. There are swift hours and very long seconds. Past time is void. There is no chronology of events to mark it; external duration no longer exists.
You know that the days are piling up. You can feel the creeping numbness, the memory of life growing weak. Burial. Each hour is like a shovelful of earth falling noiselessly, softly, on this grave.
The first day in a cell contains, in miniature, the months, years, decades which will follow till death, which may wait for you at the end, and whose terrors you live through more than once. The effects of living in a cell develop according to a constant curve: I tend to think that only their rhythm may vary among individuals.
In the main, they are characterized by three phenomena. First, exaltation, whose causes may be frivolous to the point of total insignificance. I have known inmates to live twenty-four hours or several days of radiant inner joy in expectation of an exchange of glances, during fatigue duty. A fifteen-minute visit is enough to fill long days with expectation and long days with memory afterwards. A word, a gesture, a detail can feed the inner flame indefinitely. What extraordinary events letters are! War veterans probably remember what these little paper rectangles covered with familiar writing coming from the other world—from the strange, storybook world of the living—meant to them in the trenches, which are in many respects like prisons … They know how some brows used to darken after mail call and how other radiant or tragic faces pored over their letters. The exaltations of a man confined in prison take on the most varied forms. An exacerbation of emotional attachments, sex drives, the instinct for survival, religious faith, or political convictions is its most frequent manifestation. The periods of exaltation are followed, as a reaction, by periods of apathy. Dejection: dull torpor, indifference.
I believe that this exaltation belongs to the period of struggle—which varies in length, and ends, once a man is freed from a decisive mental aberration and no longer puts up much resistance, in a state of vegetative, slow-motion existence in which sharp sufferings and sharp joys no longer play a part. I have met convicts like that who were astonishingly placid in their sixth, seventh, or tenth year of confinement.
This exaltation gives birth to obsession. The brain, at once anemic and feverish, is overcome by an idea, an image. In the absence of contact with outside reality, in the unreality of this deathlike existence, in the ruins of one’s former mental equilibrium, an idée fixe can move in and take over. There are those, usually males, who are haunted by a hallucinating carnal memory. Some are led to morbid lewdness by persistent sexual obsessions. Some are tormented by jealousy day and night, night and day. When you speak to them, they don’t understand at first, “return from somewhere” blushing all at once, and are delighted by the unexpected diversion. There are also those, hardly less numerous, who are obsessed by their “case,” who never stop weighing, trying, analyzing, and examining the details of their imaginary briefs. These are the ones who are really “guilty,” drowning men clutching at straws. Tireless, they write out long memoranda, underlining their “essential” arguments two or three times, arguing over the legal Code, which they have learned by heart, piling defense upon defense to the point of absurdity, sometimes to the point of an indirect but unmistakable admission of what they are denying … Some are devoured by the obsession of death, and these will die in prison. For the fear of death is already death’s lure, the weakening of the organism, death itself … Some, desperate with anxiety, yearn for someone who is absent, beyond these walls. Obsessed by the thought of an accident, by the absolute, unreasoning certainty that the other person will die … Some, obsessed by hate, bear a grudge against a judge, a cop on the vice squad, a “fag,” a “female.” These are the ones who kill when they get out of prison. They never die in prison. It is possible to live on hate and murder.
The manias and superstitions, common in varying degrees among all prisoners, are phenomena related to obsession. The connections between these various aspects of mental imbalance, unreason, and failure of the will are sometimes quite apparent. Many prisoners awaiting trial, obsessed by anxiety over their defense, become afflicted (quite rapidly, within a few months) by a kind of procedure mania. They know the Code thoroughly. They quote paragraphs, articles, interpretations, and jurisprudence. They find new defenses in it. They are incapable of carrying on a few moments’ conversation without dragging in their case and quoting such and such a paragraph of the law. The authors of memoranda have the writing mania. Long after they are convicted, sometimes in the sixth or tenth year of a sentence, they are writing, still writing—petitioning for a new trial—and this gives their lives a meaning. They can always recite their irresistible arguments by heart, and they do so with voluble passion. Failure doesn’t discourage them. But if their application for permission to write is refused, this plunges them into fury or despair … In the long run, an inmate’s life is regulated by a quantity of less important little manias produced by the lack of any normal object over which he can exercise his will power. The few personal objects he owns are arranged and put away in an invariable order: Any disturbance of this housekeeping arrangement will throw him into a frenzy. (The guards, fully aware of this, weakness, deliberately exasperate it through unnecessary searches in the cells and workshops.) He puts on his clothes in a certain manner, he has his own special way of doing up his buttons. In his cell, he has his own way of walking: so many steps in such and such a direction. Never in another …
Personal superstitions are harder to get to know, for they are only revealed through confidences. My impression is that they are very common, especially among men with a certain intellectual development … It would seem that the more complete, refined, and perfect the cerebral mechanism, the greater the chances of its going off the track … Dumb brutes get off the lightest. Rare is the man who is not superstitious about lucky and unlucky dates, meetings, dreams, numbers, mental incantations. “If I count up to eleven three times before the next time a door slams, that will be a good omen.”
Mysticism often develops, but it is clearly an abnormal phenomenon. The return to religious practices in convicts or prisoners awaiting trial can usually be explained merely by the need for distraction and the hope of protection or minor privileges. True believers are quite rare today. In prison, a certain rather impoverished mysticism is common to practically everyone who begins to wonder about life’s great problems. The system tends, in a continuous manner, to weaken the mind, destroy the will, obliterate the personality, to depress, oppress, wear down, torture. If you don’t want to relapse into something close to a primitive form of religious mentality, you need regular intellectual labor, which is just about impossible to find—or else well-thought-out convictions of exceptional firmness.
The only healthy reaction of the organism against the incessant, multiple, insidious, and harassing pressure of madness is joy.
We all have great powers of vitality. We are filled with such a deep love of life that sometimes it takes only the slightest outside impulse to make the flame of joy suddenly rise up in us. And we are elevated above ourselves, the present, despair, prison. I once asked a comrade— whose life, I knew well, had been hopeless, full of suffering, a savage struggle in city slums and in jail—what had been the happiest hour of his past existence. He answered me:
“It was in V*** Prison, one Christmas night. I was alone. It was warm. I had a good book and some wine … All at once I felt so well, so calm, so glad to be able to think, so g
lad to be alive …”
Among those who succeed in resisting madness, their intense inner life brings them to a higher conception of life, to a deeper consciousness of the self, its value, its strength. A victory over jail is a great victory. At certain moments you feel astonishingly free. You sense that if this torture has not broken you, nothing will ever be able to break you. In silence you struggle against the huge prison machine with the firmness and stoic intelligence of a man who is stronger than the suffering of his flesh and stronger than madness … And, when a broad ray of sunlight inundates the barred window, when good news comes in from the outside, when you have succeeded in filling the dismal day with useful work, an inexpressible joy may ascend within you like a hymn.
The guards, peering through the peephole, are astonished to discover a radiant brow and oddly silent lips: for all the joy of living is poised on them in one unuttered cry.
EIGHT
Yet Life Goes On …
THE CELL IN WHICH I SPENT THE LONGEST TIME—A YEAR—DAZZLED ME WHEN I first entered it. The light, it seemed to me, poured in abundantly between the black stripes of a large, high, barred window. A stay of two months in a dingier cell had already atrophied my vision. The corrugated panes only permitted a hazy view of the gray wall on the other side of the court. With the transom open and standing on tiptoes, I could, in the right position, glimpse a triangle of sky: less than one square inch. Especially in summer, I often gazed, as if from the bottom of a pit, at that touching bit of sky whether it was that light blue, tinged with ashy gray, of Paris skies after a rain; or white and heavy when the mists hang low; or luminously, implacably blue, that hard blue which made a poet cry out:
Où fuir dans la révolte inutile et perverse?
Je suis hanté. L’Azur! L’Azur! L’Azur! L’Azur!4
and which brutally overwhelmed me, beyond all thought of “literature.” It was an inexpressible feeling. What was its deepest source: Joy? Suffering at once denied and embraced? Serenity at once profound and active? It matters little.
In winter the skeleton of a leafless tree raised its scraggy branches over the top of the wall. I used to think: “That’s the street out there.” I didn’t know which one. The central heating hardly worked at all. You were numb with cold several hours a day. The electricity went on early; but the bulb, which was weak and placed too high, never cast enough light on your book. Your eyes burned. Nonetheless, this was better than grimy daylight.
My turn in the exercise yard often came early in the morning, around eight o’clock. Pacing briskly up and down—caged, but under an open sky in the cold air, in the half-light of dawn. A closed horizon: the quadrangle of square, massive, black buildings; the rows of oblong barred windows glowed against this background of dark masonry. It made you think of some bizarre furnace seen from the outside. Once in a while a gasping cry might be heard somewhere, clinging to those bars. A man, having hoisted himself up to his window—a genuine feat of acrobatics—was howling at the light, at the open air, from within his brick and concrete cage. The howlings would die down, rise up again, fade away like a flame flickering in the wind. You could imagine the struggle between the “screws” and the desperate man, first beaten senseless, then dragged off toward the hole.
Another event: the cat passing by. This prison cat was a horrible beast, horribly intelligent. He used to slither around the exercise yards with expert insolence. He never paid attention to a man; he ate the scraps of foodstuffs that were brought to him without hurrying. And then went away, undemonstrative, indifferent, without a friendly purr for the man bending over him in the unfathomable surprise of fondling a little life which was warm, primitive, free, and vaguely feminine. When you had nothing to give him, the cat would pass you by without a look. His dirty white fur seemed to have taken on the color of the prison stones.
Sometimes, at the very beginning of spring, we were lucky enough to enjoy the marvelous warmth of the first vernal sun. If you shine a ray of light on a drop of water under a microscope, you can see the tiny organisms that live inside gathering together in the light. A prison yard spotted here and there with sunlight has often reminded me of that experiment; and the men shivering in their ray of sunlight, pale and joyful, reminded me of microbes …
The silhouette of the walls almost never let the sunlight bathe the whole of the exercise yard; but one corner of the cement cage was gilded. The men stood there: an old man with turned-up collar smiling through dull-green eyes at the renewed warmth; a young convict happily stretching his limbs with a few gymnastic exercises; a chilly, sick man, holding in his shivers, breathing in the beneficent light through all his pores. I felt a sudden “whiplash” through my whole organism.
My imagination gallivanted about, whims, desires, memories, dreams, projects abounding, inner rhythms awakening …
What microbes we are!
Then, above the outside wall, at the point where branches made crazy hatchmarks against the whiteness of the sky, green patches of leaves would appear.
One day, one of my extremely rare visitors looked at those faraway leaves and exclaimed:
“Why, the chestnuts are in flower!”
Together we stared at those bright-green patches through the milky glass; we were finally able to make out white borders on them like motionless snowflakes. There were flowers there. As long as they remained, albeit half-invisible, I greeted them several times a day. Later on, I realized, from the deep, darker green of the leaves, that they had gone away; but of all the flowers I have seen in my life, these—which I never really saw—have left me the most charming memory.
Our eyes need colors. Because for whole seasons I had seen no colors other than that green patch of inaccessible foliage, I developed an obsessive desire for colors. The letters I received sometimes came in envelopes lined with red, violet, blue, or green silk paper. I used these shreds of paper as bookmarks. It was a joy for any eyes to come upon a red square between two pages. Like a child, I would sometimes spread out these colors on my table. Or close my eyes to remember some dazzling material.
4 Whither can I flee in this futile and perverse revolt?
I am haunted. Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure!
—Mallarmé (Tr.)
NINE
Encounters
ALTHOUGH THE GOAL IN PRISON IS TOTAL ISOLATION, COMMUNICATIONS ARE eventually established among the inmates. There are accidental meetings, glances exchanged on the way to the exercise yards. Somebody throws a “telegram,” a wad of paper weighted with breadcrumbs, into your exercise yard. Friendships are born, correspondences start up …
For many long months my neighbor was a pale convict, broad and heavy-set, with an oversized head like a sad clown’s. I had no wish to make friends. He overcame my indifference by hailing me during an exercise period.
“Listen! This is good!”
We were in two different exercise yards on either side of a dividing wall. Whenever the guard, making his rounds on the circular gallery above our heads, was down at the other end of the vast courtyard, we had a good thirty seconds to talk. “This is good!”
I could hear my neighbor laughing quietly on the other side of the wall.
“You’re listening? Yes? Well, your buddy B*** just killed the Chief of the Sûreté … Oremus!”5
I had heard nothing of “my buddy B***” for several months. All I knew was that they were hunting him down from hide-out to hide-out and that he would sell his skin dearly. The joyful voice put off my questions:
“That’s all I know, pal. One of the boys on the clean-up squad told me. They’re all laughing. They’re as happy as little women since they heard about it. Do you hear them every night, the girls?”
I heard them … The nights were beautiful, heavy, starry—those summer nights when you feel surrounded by all the warmth and primitive fervor of life. Only ten yards from our windows, under the heavy branches of the chestnut trees, couples used to lurk in the darkness of the deserted street. And we often heard the piercing
laughter of young women—that prolonged laughter which is a nervous reaction to the struggles, caresses, and uneasy games of desire.
“You hear them, right? … They sure in hell treat themselves to a good time, the bitches! …”
Then, as if to seal a mutual understanding based on a common joy linked to a common suffering, my neighbor concluded without any transition:
“… Anyway, it sure feels good to hear he got what was coming to him, the bastard.”
The ice had been broken. Our relations became friendly. A true Apache, our sad-faced clown was serving out his fourth sentence for theft: eighteen months, I think. The prosecution was preparing various other accusations against him. One two-year sentence was hanging over him, on appeal. At the end of all of this, nothing—except death, or a miracle. He believed—quietly, without fervor—in a miracle: escape. And he was prolonging “the pleasure” of being here, in the Santé Prison, dressed in threadbare denim, spending his days making paper fans, smoking on the sly now and then, getting letters from his “wife.”
“When they add all that up, you understand, I’ll get at least five years in Guiana. Once I get there, I’ll see if I can’t escape …”
“How much have you done already?”
“Eight months, pal, with nothing to eat …”
He earned a few centimes a day, which he spent on illegal tobacco. But three times a week I heard the mailman noisily unlocking his door and then I understood his silent joy, dissolving into a long, stifled laugh; his sad clown’s joy; the joy kindled by a little square of pink paper …
This joy brightened his dead-end existence so much that he finally confided in me. But not without first making sure he wouldn’t be opening any old wounds, causing any hurts (“you’ve got a wife too, right? … I hear the mailman every day when he comes to you … I says to myself: Only his woman would write him so often …”). He threw me a few of his precious letters over the wall in the exercise yard. They were written in a big, childish hand, and full of “my dear little man” and “your woman for life.”
